Making city and citizenship in the "white Buenos Aires"

Abstract

Buenos Aires conceived as the "white and European" city of Latin America expresses a network of urban inequality linked to its constitutive colonial matrix. From an approach from urban and citizenship anthropology in conversation with decolonial perspectives, this work reflects on the relationship between the subalterization of Afro-descendants and immigrants, and in particular, women who dispute access to the city in the southern river basin of the Riachuelo ―especially the central-southern neighborhoods of the city of Buenos Aires and Avellaneda in the province of Buenos Aires―. For this, the article exposes part of the doctoral research work in the historic center of Buenos Aires and postdoctoral anthropological action research started in 2017 and ended in 2020 with an association of Afro-descendant women who demand housing rights and other social rights through their cultural visibility. The analysis stops at the ways of making the city intertwined with the ways of making citizenship and concludes on the relevance of the horizontal dimension of citizenship in its insurgent, substantive and active character as a challenge to urban inequalities and the productions of socio-spatial segregations “silenced” on the microlocal scale in contexts of multiculturalism.